by Tom Wood
Careful thought was given to where low-copy DNA may have survived the initial examination by detectives in 1977 and the passage of time. The conclusion of the scientists was that there was a time capsule within the forensic materials – a place that had been left undisturbed and unexamined since the time when the crimes were committed. That place was the centre of the knots used to bind the girls. The secrets locked in these bindings had the potential to produce vital clues to the identities of Helen and Christine’s killers. Such was the advance in forensic science that, if you had suggested a breakthrough like this was possible to the detectives of the 70s, the response would have been bewilderment and disbelief. However, that was exactly where the next stage of this scientific mystery tour was to take us to and with considerable success.
This part of the story is a great example of how the determination of officers involved in the World’s End case has paid off over the years. By this time, the responsibility of the inquiry rested with Detective Superintendent Ian Thomas and the then Detective Inspector Allan Jones. They were typical of a long line of able and dedicated detectives who, over the years, worked with the scientists to keep the World’s End case alive. Ian and Allan had come through the same route to hold senior ranks in the CID. They were both career detectives with long experience across a wide range of investigations. Ian’s experience was mainly in the City while Allan’s service had predominantly been in the County. They are very different individuals but they shared invaluable traits essential to successful detectives, they were imaginative, energetic and stubborn – they never, but never, gave up. When an obstacle blocked their path, they worked until they found a way round it and the potential obstacle was sometimes me.
As the investigation ground on, the costs rose and there were always other priorities. Time without number over the years, Ian, Allan or their predecessors would come to me to plead their case for funding. Money was tight but they always convinced me as to the merits of their case. Their passion and commitment made them impossible to deny. It was just as well for I am convinced that, without them and those who went before them, the World’s End case would have remained a mystery to this day.
Ian and Allan had long realised that new developments in forensic science held the key and they had regular formal and informal meetings with colleagues like scientists Lester Knibb and Derek Scrimger and people from further afield, ever hopeful of hearing of a new technique, a development that could help this case.
So it must have been with a sense of excitement and anticipation that Allan Jones turned up at Wetherby in the spring of 2002 with the carefully preserved tights and belt that had been used to bind the girls. This was only to be partially fruitful. The Forensic Science Service were able to say yes there was recoverable and identifiable DNA at the centre of the knots but there was insufficient to allow any meaningful progress to be made on the already established but unidentified sample from the semen.
The findings from Wetherby did, however, produce sufficient information for officers to embark on a major new line of inquiry unparalleled since the early days of the case. The total absence of a match on the DNA database led my force to go off on what could only be described as an elimination exercise. The profile we had was of sufficiently high quality that the scientists were certain that, if we were able to find a relative of the source of the sample, we would be able to home in on the culprit. So it was that officers embarked on one of the biggest operations in the case since the original inquiry – a venture known as a Familial Search Operation. Swabs were issued to hundreds of men and they were asked to use them to provide us with a sample of their DNA. All the swabs were analysed and, if everything went to plan, there was a good chance that the extended family of the culprit would be discovered.
There were sufficient reference points in the DNA chain of the partially profiled sample that we had for it to be compared to DNA profiles on the national database and near matches extracted. We could then speak to those who were near matches and check their criminal records and those of their families to see if that would lead us to a perfect match. There is little need for me to say here just what an expensive, labour-intensive and painstaking process this kind of work is and, inevitably, for the teams involved in such tasks, morale is at first high but it begins to flag as time passes without any positive results.
Having drawn a blank in the east of Scotland, it was decided to try the same operation in the west which, due to the fact that the population is many times greater, would be an even bigger and more difficult job.
It was at this point that the breakthrough which had eluded us for twenty-six years came about. As so often happens in these cases, it was one we were not expecting.
In the trawling operation centred on Edinburgh, we had been looking for a general match of nuclear DNA, often abbreviated to nDNA. This is the type of DNA that is most helpful to forensic scientists as it contains more useful genetic information than its counterpart, mitochondrial DNA – that is to say it offers a wide range of variables that can be examined.
During the month of January 2004, great effort and thought were put into trying to come up with a different approach to what was a massive task and one that had no certainty of success. We were advised it would be sensible to isolate the Y chromosome of our DNA sample and use that alone as the control for the testing in the west of Scotland. The point of this approach was twofold. Firstly, unlike other elements of DNA, Y chromosomes do not change from father to son and, secondly, being able to concentrate on checking just one part of the profile would be faster and more cost efficient so it would allow us to put more resources into following up potential matches.
So it was that Allan Jones and his colleagues set off for yet another DNA testing laboratory with specialist techniques, this time in Birmingham, to isolate the Y chromosome in the coat sample and begin what would inevitably turn into an operation stretching out over many months. Fate intervened and two forensic scientists in Birmingham were able to give us the evidence we needed to put a name to the man we had been searching for all these years, but amazingly it wasn’t the man who had left the original marks. While they were working on the coat sample to isolate the Y chromosome of the first sample, they discovered what we had suspected all along – there was not just one DNA code there but two. All the time, a second identifiable sample of DNA, in a much smaller quantity, had been there, masked by the more prevalent profile. It was confirmation of what we had believed all along – two men had been involved in the murders of Helen and Christine – and now, for the first time, we had the complete DNA profile of both of them.
One weekend in early spring 2004, I got a phone call from Roger Orr, our head of CID, saying that Ian and Allan urgently wanted to meet me. The importance of the breakthrough can be gauged by the fact that we didn’t wait until the Monday to discuss it. Instead, on the Sunday afternoon, we met in my office at Fettes Headquarters. When I was told of the development, Ian and Allan’s elation was clear for all to see. This is exactly what they had hoped would happen – because of their ability to shine a light back through time, the scientists had picked out the killers who had evaded normal policing techniques for so long. All their efforts had not been in vain.
Their elation was even more justified when it emerged that the new profile, the one belonging to the long-concealed second man, had matched one that was already on the national register of DNA profiles. We’d got a hit – it meant there would be no familial chain to work along, no difficult cross-referencing to be done and no statistical analyses to be carried out. The profile found in Birmingham was that of Angus Robertson Sinclair.
The name was vaguely familiar to some of us as he had, we recalled, fairly recently stood trial for a sex killing in Glasgow. The Scottish Criminal Records Office told us that Sinclair already had a prolific history of abduction and violent sex crime. At long last, we had one of the men involved in the World’s End case firmly in the frame. One way or another, we were certain he would lead
us to the second.
The low-copy DNA testing of the knots on the items used to bind the girls also indicated the presence of Sinclair. And elements of three other low-copy DNA samples were found – that of each of the girls themselves plus another which matched the dominant DNA profile obtained from the coat. This reinforced the theory that two men had been involved throughout.
So it was that Operation Trinity came into being. Now we had a suspect, it was time to see if there was concrete evidence of his involvement in any of the other unsolved killings in Scotland that, over the years, had been linked to the World’s End case.
Testing of samples recovered from Helen’s body also revealed Sinclair’s DNA in much smaller quantities which is why it too had been masked for all these years by the dominant sample. In the case of Christine Eadie, it was more difficult. She had been left naked and her outer clothing was never found. However, the bra used to gag her had traces of DNA which could have belonged to Sinclair and strings of what could have been Sinclair’s DNA were also found amongst the unidentified male DNA profile in samples taken from Christine’s body.
All in all, the scientists were building up a pretty comprehensive picture of the likely sequence of events all those years ago on that dreadful night in Edinburgh and East Lothian. We now had a number-one suspect who we had discovered already had convictions that would put him right in the offender profile for a likely perpetrator of the World’s End murders. We also had the original DNA profile that we hadn’t been able to match on the database so now the challenge was to try to put a name to it. We believed this could be done by careful investigation of our named suspect’s life around the time of the killings. If we could find out who he associated with, who his friends were, who he might have been with in Edinburgh that night in October 1977, we might be on to something. The next step would be to take this hopefully small group of people, gather DNA samples from each, conduct the analysis and, with any luck, we would find the answer.
But tangential to the high-tech scientific approach to the case, there would have to be an old-fashioned police inquiry involving officers interviewing and reinterviewing witnesses from the first inquiry and then building up a massively detailed background knowledge of our suspect. This sort of in-depth investigation is tough enough at the best of times but, given the number of intervening years, it would be taxing indeed. When viewed from 2004, the fact that Bing Crosby had died the day before Christine and Helen were murdered was not the great aid to the memory it had once been.
We would be revisiting evidence that, when it was originally found, may not have been viewed as significant but, now that we knew the identity of one of the killers, had the potential to become rather important. We also were aware of the fact that it was entirely likely that we would uncover other crimes committed by this individual. Quite what those would be was of course, at that stage, just another mystery but, in the fullness of time, details of any other crimes committed by the suspect could help us build a better picture and so it was to be.
The first part of our task was to build up as complete a profile as possible of the man the DNA told us was our prime suspect, a painter and decorator, now a prisoner in his fifties by the name of Angus Robertson Sinclair. This man had already shocked the country with his depraved offending but his name would soon for ever be linked with the World’s End killings.
5
Angus Sinclair
The DNA identification of one of the men at the scene of the World’s End killings was the breakthrough in the investigation we had waited a generation for. It had seemed clear on that first Sunday afternoon thirty years ago when the girls’ bodies were found that we were almost certainly looking for two men – and they were men of the utmost brutality. It seemed equally certain that anyone capable of such callous acts was unlikely to be a first offender. The abduction and murder of two young women can be no accident. Such coolness of execution is not likely to have been the culmination of events that had started off with innocent intentions and had perhaps somehow got out of hand. It seemed to us that the crime was the premeditated conclusion of a carefully planned operation or at least the likely outcome.
The eventual isolation of one person’s DNA and the match on the police database to Angus Robertson Sinclair took us on a journey through the depths of criminality to a man who allowed nothing to stand in the way of his violent sexual urges and thereafter not only showed no remorse for what he had done but actually demonstrated over time utter contempt for his victims.
In his book The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman writes: ‘Good and evil are names for what people do, not what they are.’ In my experience, this is usually true in that most murders are not premeditated; they are usually the tragic consequence of a moment’s madness or passion – a loss of control that ends a life and changes the lives of many others for ever.
Many murderers have no other convictions, are not career criminals and, like their victims, are sometimes simply in the wrong place at the wrong time in the wrong state of mind. I have sat with a good number of murderers immediately after their arrest. For the most part, they are frightened, nervous, pathetic individuals – more often to be pitied than despised. It’s a popular misconception that policemen feel anger, rage and righteous indignation when arresting people for murder – some may but the usual feeling is one of sadness and regret for the tragic waste of life. As far as that large percentage of murderers is concerned, Pullman is undoubtedly right but there are also those who must fall into another category. These include the sadists, the psychopaths, the sociopaths, the multiple killers and, probably worst of all, the child killers – people like the Moors murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley; Robert Black who killed little Susan Maxwell, Caroline Hogg and Sarah Harper; and, more recently, the Soham killer, Ian Huntley. In terms of the planning, the repetition, the cruel indifference to suffering and the cool demeanour they show in the aftermath of their crimes, these individuals challenge Pullman’s theory. I believe there are evil people – evil people whose actions put them beyond any forgiveness or sympathy – and Angus Robertson Sinclair is one of them.
The catalogue of crime Sinclair had been convicted of by the time our investigation into his background began was already one of the worst in Scottish criminal history. It was a criminal record sufficient to earn him a place in the premier league of notorious offenders across the UK. Since 1982, Sinclair has been in jail continuously and is unlikely ever to be released. For some reason, however, Sinclair was not widely known to the public and had managed to escape the notoriety his crimes deserved to have marked him with. Whilst they have all been extensively reported, such is the time span of his offending and the gaps between his arrests that the totality of it seems to have slipped by. It is almost as though the constituent parts of his criminal record have not been added up so that the full range of his crimes has not been apparent – until now.
He has, in fact, been known to the police for most of his life but, because of his cunning, his fastidious attention to detail and some degree of luck, together with the careful way in which victims were selected, I am convinced that he has escaped the kind of intense police scrutiny he deserved. He got away with too much for too long.
Let me say at this point that I firmly believe it is entirely likely that locked away in the mind of this man are details of many more horrific crimes that we will never know of. We certainly uncovered irrefutable evidence of serious violent offending, robberies and non-sexual assaults as part of our inquiry into his past – crimes that all bore the Sinclair hallmark in that they were chilling in their violence and displayed callous disregard for people’s lives and suffering. Who knows what else lies hidden by the passage of time?
Being a criminal is not like a normal career with recognisable routes to the top of your chosen trade or profession. Most crimes, especially violent ones, are unplanned and haphazard. The most successful criminals are never caught. It often amuses police officers to see notorious underworld figures descri
bed as top criminals when, in fact, they have spent half their lives in jail. The truth is that their notoriety, by definition, makes them failures. Being caught and having a long criminal record are hardly an indication of success – remember that the next time you see Mad Findlay or Crazy Charlie on a television chat show. If they were that good, how come they got caught and convicted so often? It is the ones that are never caught, the ones you never hear of who are the true professionals.
Amongst sexual offenders, however, there is often a clear pattern of escalating seriousness of offence as the perpetrator becomes increasingly more confident in his ability to avoid detection or as the need for ever greater thrills drives him deeper into depravity. That is not to say that all minor offenders go on to carry out more serious offences. They don’t but the thefts of knickers from washing lines can lead to more serious crimes and they cannot be ignored. Left unchecked, the park flasher can sometimes go on to become the park rapist if their behaviour is not confronted. Most sex offenders arrested for serious crimes have clues in their backgrounds, pointers to what their future behaviour might be. Some have minor sex crime convictions and many have been victims themselves. One of the greatest challenges of managing lesser sex offenders is the difficulty in spotting the ones who are likely to continue to offend and, worse, those whose offences will escalate and become ever more serious. Social workers and the police are often criticised when it goes wrong. With hindsight, it’s always easy to spot the ones who are going to become serious offenders – the tabloids are very good at it – but, in the real world, it is very hard. Looking at a range of people with similar convictions, it’s almost impossible to sit down and do an analysis of the circumstances and predict which men will cease offending, which will stay at the same level and which will become a major danger to society.